Creative Lockdown Project: Edible alphabet

Creative Lockdown Project: Edible alphabet

This is the third creative lockdown challenge. These challenges are designed to be a bit of fun and to document our time collectively spent in lockdown. Please share this creative challenge with your friends and post your final results on social media.

Challenge
Use the food you have in your home to create an edible alphabet. Think about a word you would like to spell out and work out how to make the letters. Will you arrange the food you’re about to eat or would you like to bake something from scratch?

Don’t go out shopping to buy any extra ingredients, the challenge is to use what you can find in your kitchen. It would be great to see photos of the process as you bake or create your letters.

Results
Share your finished project on social media with #CreativeLockdownProject. Tag #TypeTasting as I’ll be sharing some of the results.

Support the studio
All live events, workshops and talks have been cancelled due to Coronavirus. Virtual events will be announced soon. Meanwhile, you can play a vital role in ensuring that the studio rent is paid by buying me a cup of virtual coffee here. Your help means that I can continue run workshops, research and events again once we’re out the other side, Sarah.

Examples shown: SWEET by Julie Mauro, TYPE by Nathan Dye and EAT MY WORDS by Theo Stewart.

 

 

Creative Lockdown Project: Human body alphabet

Creative Lockdown Project: Human body alphabet

This is the second creative lockdown challenge designed to be a bit of fun and to document our time collectively spent in lockdown. Please share it with friends and post your final results on social media with #CreativeLockdownProject. If you also tag #TypeTasting I’ll be sharing some of the results.

Challenge

For you and a friend to create an alphabet using the human body and a video chat app. You need at least one other self-isolating person to take part, but feel free to turn it into an alphabet challenge party with a large group of friends!

Process

1. Start a video chat with a friend.

2. Take turns creating each letter of the alphabet by posing in different ways. You may need to improvise with props for some of the letters.

3. To document each letter, the person not posing takes a screengrab or photograph of the screen.

4. Compile all the letters to create the full alphabet. Leave the Zoom, Houseparty or Skype frames around the letters. This will document how we’re all socialising while we’re in lockdown. But remember to block out any ID numbers!

Results

Share your finished project on social media with #CreativeLockdownProject. If you also tag #TypeTasting I’ll be sharing some of the results.

Example
Disco Type, a typeface created by Steven Gunner, Sam McLeod, Nick Watts and Sarah Hyndman at the St Bride Library, London.

Support the studio
All live events, workshops and talks have been cancelled due to Coronavirus. Virtual events will be announced soon. Meanwhile, you can play a vital role in ensuring that the studio rent is paid by buying me a cup of virtual coffee here. Your help means that I can continue run workshops, research and events again once we’re out the other side, Sarah.

Creative Lockdown Project: Object alphabet

Creative Lockdown alphabet ideas

Creative Lockdown Project: Object alphabet

These are strange and unsettling times as around a quarter of the world’s population is now living under lockdown. We’re all readjusting to the new situation and contemplating the future, but the most important thing we can do is listen to the scientists and to stay at home.

Every week I’m going to post a creative project you can do at home that will be a bit of fun and will also document our time collectively spent in lockdown. This is the first creative challenge, please share it with friends and post your final results on social media with #CreativeLockdownProject. If you also tag #TypeTasting I’ll be sharing some of the results.

Challenge

Look around your home and find an object that you would like to turn into an alphabet. It’s fun if this is clearly a household object so that it represents your time spent in lockdown. For example you could use your glasses, a pair of scissors, a coathanger, kitchen utensils or a child’s toy.

Process

1. Think about how you can reproduce its shape. You could photograph it, trace around it, print with it, put paper over it and take rubbings, draw or paint it.

2. Create each letter of the alphabet. You can rotate, dissect and repeat its shape to make the letters. For an extra challenge add in glyphs like &, !, ?, @ and numbers.

Results

Share your finished project on social media with #CreativeLockdownProject. If you also tag #TypeTasting I’ll be sharing some of the results.

Examples

Elastic band alphabet by Catherine Nippe

Bottle opener alphabet by Hannah Clark

Lego alphabet by Marcos Arruda

Support the studio
All live events, workshops and talks have been cancelled due to Coronavirus. Virtual events will be announced soon. Meanwhile, you can play a vital role in ensuring that the studio rent is paid by buying me a cup of virtual coffee here. Your help means that I can continue run workshops, research and events again once we’re out the other side, Sarah.

Typography workshops for school students

I had the privilege of running workshops at the Design Museum last week for the next generation of talented designers. The museum runs an annual competition for schools to design a product to be sold in the Design Museum shop. I had a brilliant day running one-hour workshops for the ten schools shortlisted in this Design Ventura competition.

The students from years 9, 10 and 11 took part in activities including personality name badges, supermarket sweep, what’s the product? and ended with typography karaoke, which they designed and performed. They were all fantastic and I hope a few went away with a newfound love of typography.

The surprising story of the ampersand & its multiple personalities

An ampersand is an invitation to imagine what will come next. It is a continuation of a conversation or story, but without the context of knowing what went before you can choose where you would like it to go. When the symbol stands alone it is still communicating a huge amount of information from its form and its shapes; is it hand-written, is it old-fashioned and traditional, is it minimalist and modern? Every typeface tells a story independently of the words it spells out.

The ampersand is sometimes considered to be the 27th letter of the Latin alphabet. It comes from the letters ‘et’, Latin for ‘and’. It’s a character that there is wide affection for and it gives a glimpse of the personality of a typeface without committing to be a particular letter. The ampersand takes a wide range of shapes and forms, and it is the skill of the human brain that enables us to recognise that each of these still says ‘and’.

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Mood at MAX multisensory installation

Type Tasting installation at Adobe MAX in Los Angeles

Type Tasting created a large-scale multisensory installation for Adobe Fonts at the Adobe MAX conference in Los Angeles from 2nd to 6th November 2019.

“F*!*ing genius!”

Visitors were immersed in the mood of different typefaces through all of their senses. At each station they were invited to put on headphones, to smell a scent in a jar or by flipping the pages of a book, to eat a small taster and to feel a texture. Each set of stimuli was designed to bring a mood to life in the participant’s imagination. There was curiosity and intrigue as the first visitors arrived and they were soon returning with groups of friends saying “you have to try this”.

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How Punk changed Graphic Design and is history repeating itself?

Punk emerged as a reaction to the rigid restrictions of Modernism and its style ripped up the rules of Swiss minimalism and neutral sans serif typography. As traditional attitudes came to be considered outdated, society rebelled against the mainstream and demanded change. It feels like we are at a similar turning point today, both culturally and typographically. Can we look to history for parallels in how graphic design and cultural attitudes are changing today?

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How designing for all the senses has more impact on mood

We absorb information through all of our senses simultaneously. This speeds up our ability to judge situations and react quickly and is fundamental to our ability to recognise signals and communicate. This played a vital role in human survival when our ancestors needed to respond to danger quickly, often relying on sound or smell when it was dark and a large proportion of our genes are still devoted to detecting odours.

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Why teach young children about fonts?

Introducing your children to the fantastical world of fonts will give them a head start towards a future career in the creative industries.

My 11-year-old nephew Eddie was excited to see me last Christmas because he wanted to talk about fonts. He’d started to learn about the topic at school and had lots of brilliant questions like “why are there so many?” The two of us have been hatching plans to create a book together and I’ve also been asking lots of other children what they think. My initial proposal had been rejected by a number of mainstream children’s publishers—the main feedback is that “children aren’t interested in fonts”. I disagree with this because the children I’ve spoken to are very interested in the topic. In response, I’m publishing these books as part of the new Type Tasting Books venture. This is how I published my first book ‘The Type Taster’, which is now published by Penguin/Random House as the bestselling ‘Why Fonts Matter’.

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